Publications and Research Outputs

Although the full list of research outputs is available from my extended CV, below are as many pdfs of these research outputs that can be made available. Alternatively, a detailed listing with some full text attachments is available on Research Gate.

Shadow State was successfully launched in Johannesburg and Cape Town. Amazingly, the publishers had the book ready for launching the same week the Zondo Commission into State Capture began its hearings. This created the perfect media setting for the launch of the book. Below is the link to my talk at the Johannesburg launch.

Finally, after 4 years of intensive work by an international research team co-led by myself and Prof Maarten Hajer from Utrecht University, the final report was launched at the Resilient Cities conference in Bonn on 26 April 2018. Herewith all the links to the main report, summary, press release and fact sheet:

This is my latest paper co-authored with colleagues from Melbourne. It provides a useful summation of the literature on South Africa’s contradictory commitments to decarbonisation, renewable energy and expanded coal-based energy production. The information on the declining coal industry is useful. With renewables now half the price of fossil fuel-based energy and ESKOM on the threshold of an institutional rupture and subsequent break-up, South Africa might be able to do now what it was unable to do in 1994, i.e transcend the mineral-energy-complex (MEC) which was the economic core of Apartheid. The post-1994 Government did little to dismantle the MEC, partly because of socio-technological lock-in. The remarkable growth of investments in renewables over the past five years suggests that there may be some truth in the CSIR claim that renewables could meet up to 90% of our energy requirements. For the paper, click on link below.

Abstract
The transition to sustainable resource efficient cities calls for new governance arrangements. The
awareness that the doubling of the global urban population will result in unsustainable levels of
demand for natural resources requires changes in the existing socio-technical systems. Domestic
material consumption could go up from 40 billion tons in 2010, to 89 billion tons by 2050.
While there are a number of socio-technical alternatives that could result in significant
improvements in the resource efficiency of urban systems in developed and developing countries
(specifically bus-rapid transit, district energy systems and green buildings), we need to rethink
the urban governance arrangements to get to this alternative pathway. We note modes of urban
governance have changed over the past century as economic and urban development paradigms
have shifted at the national and global levels. This time round we identify cities as leading actors
in the transition to more sustainable modes of production and consumption as articulated in
the Sustainable Development Goals. This has resulted in a surge of urban experimentation across
all world regions, both North and South. Building on this empirically observable trend we
suggest this can also be seen as a building block of a new urban governance paradigm. An
‘entrepreneurial urban governance’ is proposed that envisages an active and goal-setting role for
the state, but in ways that allows broader coalitions of urban ‘agents of change’ to emerge. This
entrepreneurial urban governance fosters and promotes experimentation rather than suppressing
the myriad of such initiatives across the globe, and connects to global city networks for systemic
learning between cities. Experimentation needs to result in a contextually appropriate balance
between economic, social, technological and sustainable development.

Reference details: Jacobs, G., Swilling, M., Nagan, W., Morgan, J. and Gills, B. 2017. Quest for a New Paradigm in Economics – A Synthesis of Views of the New Economics Working Group. Cadmus, 3(2):1-25.

The Betrayal of the Promise report was launched at Wits University tonight. Over 200 people attended and the mainstream news channel eNews gave it the headline spots. All the main news media covered the event and the content of the talks. Herewith below a copy of the report, and my talk.

The Rector-Mayor Forum that coordinates activities between Stellenbosch University and Stellenbosch Municipality facilitated an amazing collaboration between Stellenbosch University researchers and top municipal officials to develop a spatial vision for Stellenbosch town. Called the Shaping Stellenbosch campaign, this resulted in an innovative Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) approach to the future. Unfortunately, the approach has not been adopted because influential land owners on the peripheries have convinced key policy makers that it is preferable to sprawl Stellenbosch outwards away from the poor areas and lively CBD. The Shaping Stellenbosch document is attached.